A path with a heart

In 1973, the March 5 issue of Time Magazine featured Carlos Castaneda, an American author who became a cultural phenomenon writing about shamanism.

Carlos Castaneda was a UCLA-educated anthropologist, and in the late 1960s, he started writing books about sorcery, magic, and psychoactive drugs.

Castaneda’s first book chronicled his purported apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian from Mexico named Don Juan. A sorcerer who taught Castaneda how to alter reality with peyote, jimson weed, and mushrooms. In a first-person account, Castaneda writes about supernatural divination with lizards. And turning into a blackbird.

Far out.

The University of California Press published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge in 1968 as a non-fiction work of anthropology. Everyone loved it. The Teachings of Don Juan was beautifully written, and it sold over 28 million copies in 17 languages.

UCLA gave Castaneda a PhD based on his work. Time Magazine put him on their cover and called him "an enigma wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in a tortilla".

But The Teachings of Don Juan wasn’t anthropology. Castaneda made it all up.

Today, most people agree it was just good fiction. His ex-wife, Margaret Runyan, told the New York Times she doubts Don Juan ever existed.

Castaneda told a lot of lies. When he immigrated to the US in 1951, he lied about his education and his military service. And his real name probably wasn’t even Carlos Castaneda. Upon his death in 1998, one New York Times article called his life a “wispy blur of sly illusion and artful deceit.”

He was like a real-life Don Draper.

Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1957, when he was just 44. He was a French philosopher and writer, and he once said:

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

Don Juan likely never existed. But that doesn’t mean Castaneda didn’t speak some truth to millions of people. One of the most famous passages from The Teachings of Don Juan is:

“This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere.

Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path.

Does this path have a heart?

If the answer is no, you will know it.

…and then you must choose another path.

To learn more, check out my favorite podcast of 2021, a two-part investigative series: Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Casteneda.